Eumaeus the swineherd comments that when Odysseus was still at home Argos was a great hunting dog: “No quarry he chased in the deepest, darkest woods / could slip this hound.” A hunting dog is a perfect illustration of one of the most powerful recurrent themes in the Homeric poems: civilization as the disciplining of nature. You get a good hound by taking a creature with natural gifts and then training him to serve your purposes, bringing out that natural gift, honing and strengthening it.

On the great shield of Achilles from the Iliad, Hephaestus illustrates this again and again: we see farmers in their fields of grain, vineyards laden with ripe grapes, herds of cattle, dancers and acrobats — in each case depicting cultivation of some kind, the human improvement and transformation of what is given to us. This is for Homer the very definition of civilization, which is why when Odysseus comes across the Cyclops (Book IX) he is appalled by the fact that they neither sow nor reap, but just grab whatever grows from the ground. This fits perfectly with the fact that they have “no muster and no meeting” — no social organization, no polis — but rather each Cyclops is a law unto himself and a tyrant to his family. A Cyclops is for these very reasons uncivilized and inhuman.

Which brings us back to Argos. Here is a great hunting dog — in his own way a triumph of civilization, the product of careful breeding and thoughtful training — who is left to die miserably by the suitors who now run the house of Odysseus. They have no need for a great hound, because they don’t hunt, just as they don’t farm or even make music: they don’t produce but rather only consume. They eat Odysseus out of house and home, and never think to train or cultivate or make anything at all. They even despise storytelling — they can’t bear to listen to the “beggar” who charms everyone else with his compelling anecdotes — and they pay no attention to the bard, the singer of tales, who graces the house with the sound of his harp. They are, therefore, as uncivilized as any Cyclops; for Homer, they are not in any meaningful sense human. They deserve only death. And they get it.

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8 Responses to Hounds and Civilization

That’s good. Hunting dogs, herds and vineyards– and beds made out of trees– are great examples of disciplining nature. But what about sea-faring? Aren’t there some unpleasant images of oars plunging into the sea in the poem? Nothing is cultivated or disciplined by the sailor, only exploited, and at great risk. Does Homer think there’s something unhealthy about Odysseus’ sea-faring life that kept him away so long from his hound?

matt: Odysseus was exploiting nature and the foreigner. The suitors were exploiting and neglecting their fellow Greeks. Yes, Homer wants to evoke in the reader the emotion that Odysseus was gone too long and putting both himself and his wife (representing Greece itself) in danger by his prolonged absence.

matt, I don’t have the reference right now, but somewhere in the poem Odysseus comments that no one in his right mind would ever go to sea except when driven by hunger. He himself always travels involuntarily, which is the irony in Tennyson later celebrating him as the great voyager. He never wanted to leave home in the first place and then had to spend longer than anyone else getting back — not that he wasn’t occasionally tempted to dawdle, of course. But Homer goes far out of his way to insist that Odysseus hated his years of wandering and just wanted to stay home.

He’d have rather stayed home, but he exercised great virtues of violence and cunning on his travels, and of course at Troy. Do you imagine him reluctantly sacking cities? I think Odysseus is oriented both by cultivation and exploitation, and that the poem is in part about him figuring out that the former is superior to the latter.

I recommend reading Victor Davis Hanson’s new post about living in California. He has a humorous story comparing his weekend commute back to his farm to an Odysseus like adventure. Towards the end, he has a not so humorous account of life in rural CA, essentially pointing out the bankruptcy of the state (fiscal, moral, social) is due to problems of consumption: “In California, it is a day-by-day war between what nature and past generations have so generously bequeathed and what our bunch has so voraciously consumed.”

I recently finished Peter Hitchens’ book “The Rage Against God.” It has what is probably the best short summary of Soviet oppression against religion I have ever read. He doesn’t get as much attention as his brother, but he is as gifted a writer. Anyway, what it helped make clear from that example as well as Somalia and others (all where he travelled or lived as a journalist) is not just the distinction between civilization and barbarism but how fragile civilization can be. In other words, it takes far more time and effort to cultivate civilization than it does to descend into barbarism. When he was living in Russia near the end, he said people had to take their windshield wipers in at night or else they would be stolen. When you read things like what Hanson has written, when you look at the balance sheet of so many municipalities, states, families, and the federal gov’t, and when you consider the social decay (loss of virtue), you can’t help but wonder how fragile our civil society is at the moment. Many of our financial ratios are as bad as Greece. But whereas Greece has Germany to bail them out, no one can bail out a nation so large as ours. We are also nearing, if we are not already there, that point where every living generation has only been part of a consumption society. There are fewer and fewer memories of another way of life.

This wouldn’t be so worrisome, except that when you look to California you see a people not working hard to correct the problems but a people seemingly getting the government, culture, and economy they want. And wanting more of it. They have voted and continue to vote for this form of society. What if the people of California have not made mistakes they regret but have voted for the society the want? I don’t want to confuse that with whether they enjoy the society they want (a different question).

What’s strange is that it takes far more generations to build up a civilized society than it does to tear one down. I say strange, but this is what one might expect when considering what it might be like to live in a fallen world.

I previously purchased the Fagles translation of The Iliad and The Odyssey. You and Rod are helping motivate me to tackle them (or, at least, be tackled by them).